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Juggy

No Leaders

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On the pitch.Where are our leaders, our talismen? 
And do we miss the one that we lost in the summer? 
Crying out for a Malky Mackay type figure, or two.
In every team you can identify the leaders, usually the older heads. Even Man Utd right now have Ferdinand at the back and I bet Ryan Giggs is going to be in the dressing room right now (haven''t seen the bench). 
You look at Cardiff and they have Bellamy, Fulham have got Hangeland and Berbatov + Scott Parker who leads by example.
Stoke have got Shawcross, Whelan and Walters. Swansea Ashley Williams. 
We''ve seen Snodgrass try and assume a leadership role, trying to stamp authority - but he isn''t the right personality, he will never command enough respect. 
Who have we got? I feel like you can look at any team in this league and pick out their leaders - and right now with our squad you really can''t. Bassong is an excellent defender but is he captain material? 
Martin and Turner are calm heads, but nobody really screams out leader like a Lampard or Gerrard. 
Lambert built a team of leaders..... by buying up team captains. Crofts, Nelson, he bought half a dozen real stalwarts and model pros. Our true leader on the pitch was Holt, and he did a fine job off of the pitch too - no longer do you hear about the squad going to the dogs, or darts tournaments. 
We need to find leadership within, for me this is Hughton''s biggest failure, and a big part of the reason why things aren''t clicking.

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[quote user="Vanwink"]Leadership on and off the field is missing[/quote]
I''ve been very patient with Hughton, and have a little more patience to offer (I think the next couple of home games will decide his and our fate).
But I think this is the crux of the problem, and the responsibility for it has to lie with the person who constructed the team.
People like Crofts, and arguably Holt, were not the most talented players. But they among others were big personalities, and whilst we have upgraded in terms of ability it could be argued that Hughton has not created the right dynamic in the dressing room when it comes to personalities.
And he does have to take responsibility for that, because character and building a family was precisely how Lambert got a mid-table championship standard team up from the Championship, and then a top end Championship standard team to 12th in the Premier League. 
I don''t think it would have done us any harm to sign a couple of people in their twilight of their careers.
Even at QPR where they had the worst dressing room in football, full of arrogant overpaid tosspots who thought they were five times better than they were, the shining lights and people who gave QPR fans hope were Clint Hill and Ryan Nelson. When the latter left in February that is when they gave up hope.
It was the same mistake that Nigel Worthington made..... he ripped the spirit out of the team when releasing Malky and Iwan, our two biggest leaders. Iwan in particular was well past it, but was a big personality. Malky could have done a big job for us that season.
I don''t think it would have done us any harm at all to have tried to sign somebody like Scott Parker. 

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It''s been obvious for so long, I started a thread on the topic a while ago which got derailed by the usual suspects. But yes, the greatest quality of a manager for me is leadership, by this I don''t just mean inspiring your players to go out and die for you on the pitch! but also to instill the belief that they are great players and that they WIlLL win football matches. inspiration and self belief, great leadership skills.

Another aspect is building a squad that contains the right blend of characters, particularly those that will lead by example and show a maturity on the pitch which will give those around them confidence. The Snoddy penalty incident has been talked about ad nauseum! but that is just one example that shows a lack of maturity and leadership in our current group.

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[quote user="Vanwink"]It''s been obvious for so long, I started a thread on the topic a while ago which got derailed by the usual suspects. But yes, the greatest quality of a manager for me is leadership, by this I don''t just mean inspiring your players to go out and die for you on the pitch! but also to instill the belief that they are great players and that they WIlLL win football matches. inspiration and self belief, great leadership skills.

Another aspect is building a squad that contains the right blend of characters, particularly those that will lead by example and show a maturity on the pitch which will give those around them confidence. The Snoddy penalty incident has been talked about ad nauseum! but that is just one example that shows a lack of maturity and leadership in our current group.[/quote]
I said at the time that Snodgrass was trying hard to become the leader that we desperately need, and although he doesn''t have what it takes - at least somebody was trying to step up to the plate. 
I also wonder whether there was universal agreement among players with Bassong coming captain. As soon as he left Holt said something about Russell Martin being his choice as next captain, and the players player of the year was Michael Turner - not Bassong. 

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I think the whole "type" of team spirit has probably changed quite a bit since the time of Lambert - not necessarily a good or bad thing, just different. They all seemed very tight and lots of "banter", winding each other up, including Lambert himself a lot of the time. The likes of Russ Martin seemed like prankster/"characters in the changing room", and they all seemed to buy into that. Lambert seemed to buy players who would fit into that ethos too - it seemed that being the right fit personality wise was almost as important as how good you were on the pitch.

I think Hughton is probably more distant with the players - no more or less respected necessarily, but different. And we have got a few more foreigners coming in (again, not a bad thing - we were always going to have to start looking abroad to stay in this division), and because of needing extra quality and high prices for premier league quality, we''ve probably had to bring in players based purely on quality and ability rather than personality.

Now, none of that is necessarily a bad thing, but those who were the leaders have either moved on or possibly don''t have the same effect under this new philosophy of Hughton''s (or on the foreign players who perhaps don''t have the same senses of humour), and we haven''t really replaced them with any big characters. It is certainly a problem.

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When the dust settles after last night''s pathetic effort this thread sums up or predicament. We have a clueless manager in terms of team selection, formation, tactics, substitutions and motivation & more importantly we have nobody on the pitch who can take control & sort things out when they are so obviously going wrong. Nobody organising things, nobody shouting instructions, nobody encouraging or inspiring other players & nobody handing out justifiable rollickings when needs be. Every team must have someone who is capable of taking command on the pitch especially when help from the dug out is non existent.

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